


come home to my heart (play in the dark)

by whatsdunisdun



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Getting Together, I suppose, M/M, Rated T for semi-graphic descriptions of not-technically-real injuries, They just really love each other okay and Dex just really wants him to be okay, Thunderstorms, again kind of, canon typical alcohol abuse, mostly in canon, set in the summer before their third year!, unhealthy family relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 10:18:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16386071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatsdunisdun/pseuds/whatsdunisdun
Summary: Being in love with William Poindexter was only going to tear him apart, like lightning trying to tear the sky in two.But there’s beauty in a storm, depending on where you sit, so it seems only fair for there to be some kind of temperamental beauty in his anguish.Or: Summer brings thunderstorms to New York, and Nursey has a hole in his chest that he likes to pretend Dex put there.





	come home to my heart (play in the dark)

**Author's Note:**

> This is some random trash I threw together in like a day and a half, because storms are fun and Derek Nurse deserves good things, and I love him! Title is from Supercut by Lorde, because fight me, Derek is definitely a Lorde stan. You can find a playlist for this fic [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/evett333/playlist/7lpiQ1tWvWpFuvtIqzoB5H?si=p5H6v4FgRRmCDaoWm9fCVQ), but they’re basically just all songs I listened to while writing this that remind me of Derek and/or stormy weather! 
> 
> Shout outs to my good buddy Sabrina for educating me on living in New York and eating ramen, my friendo Ethan for talking about how ‘love is like a drunk driver in a school zone’ and not hating me for kind of stealing his idea, and my fave Kai for putting up with my texts about Angsty Stormy Derek all weekend, and just generally supporting my dumb ass. Thank you! 
> 
> Also shout out to all my fave nurseydex authors (check out my bookmarks if you wanna know who!), because I definitely stole most of my characterisation from other fics. Finally, of course, massive thank you to Ngozi for bringing these beautiful characters into the world! 
> 
> This work isn’t Beta’d, so please PLEASE tell me if you catch any mistakes. Also, let me know if you think there’s anything else I should tag/warn for. In-depth trigger warning is at the bottom, but there’s discussion of depression throughout and quite gory and intense description of symptoms, as well as a few allusions to discussion of suicide, so plead read safely.

A flash of lightning lights up the sitting room, and Derek breathes in. The room plummets back into pitch darkness, and he breathes out. A clap of thunder ricochets around the room immediately, and Derek imagines that some deity is trying to rip the material of the sky into two with their bare hands, only just failing.

 

The dull roar of rain falling heavily on the roof above him continues, an incessant but almost mindless din that Derek relaxes into, following a wild pattern that almost resembles a song in its calming ability and beautiful noise.

 

There’s no one else in the house, he knows, and for the first time in a while, that feels like a gift, like freedom, rather than the confining sentence it had felt like before. _You’re allowed to have this to yourself,_ the meticulously clean corners whisper to him, rather than _they’re not here because they don’t care, there’s no one here to help you._ It feels like an offering, like a favour, rather than like a threat.

 

Derek turned his phone off before the storm hit, not wanting to risk it, a habit drilled into him through the summers of thunderstorms in New York. It’s a moment that the person he pretends to be, the one Shitty dubbed Andover Nursey, would normally be inclined to snapchat, maybe make an artsy Instagram out of, but he’s honestly glad to just soak the moment in. He has a sudden and almost visceral urge to text Dex, even just a simple chirp or a dumb opinion of a TV show, but he can’t do that while the storm is right overhead. Instead, he sits back, and lets the storm wash down the walls in his brain, lets himself think about all the things he likes to pretend don’t exist.

 

Starting with Dex. Derek misses him, has all summer, though he’s never cared to admit it to himself. It’s almost halfway through the summer, and at the end of the break he and Dex are moving into the Haus together, and – the thing is, they never really hated each other. They maybe chirped a little viciously, and maybe that freaked out Chowder a little, but Derek thinks it was always their unique brand of affection. Chowder would grin and hug him, Dex would go bright red and tell him to fuck off. It all really meant the same thing.

 

Nursey’s always tried to frame himself as a romantic, someone who falls in love hard and fast, someone who lives for the heartache of loving someone. He tells people it’s why he does poetry; a tortured romantic who lives only to slave over laying the words of what he feels out on a page. He’s not sure, anymore, how true that image of him is.

 

He is a romantic, he’s sure. He loves with everything in him, though it’s not always a person who he loves. He’s loved hockey for a long time, loves New York, sometimes falls in love with moments, like this one. But it’s not – he’s not sure that love drives him, the way he wants people to believe. Because sometimes, loving something or someone just – isn’t enough. He thinks his parents are good enough examples. They loved him, when he was young, or at least loved the idea of having a kid, but now he sees them for about one day a year and the last time he heard from either of them was a photo of the two of them on a beach the day of his last exam. He thought, maybe, they’d meant it as a congratulation, but it had come across far more with an air of gloating, of comparing his achievements to theirs. ‘ _You have nothing to be proud of,’_ it had seemed to say, ‘ _while we have everything, especially without you.’_ Or some bullshit like that. Derek couldn’t really be fucked to deal with it, so he’d sent back a photo of the front door to their New York house cracked open and his shoes thrown on the ground beside a shoe rack covered in dusty shoes that clearly didn’t belong to him. ‘ _Call the cleaner, Derek, nothing in that house should be dusty’_ , his mother had responded in their group chat. No other texts had come in from either of them.

 

So yeah, Derek thinks, you could love something without it inspiring you to do something good about it. Just because he walked around loving moments didn’t mean he always wanted to live for more; just because he loved the feeling of joy when his skates hit fresh ice didn’t mean there weren’t days where the sight of the ice did nothing but fill him with a bone-deep weariness.

 

Being in love with someone, Derek knows from experience, tends to bring him more harm than good. And being in love with William Poindexter, though he’s hesitant to cite experience as his reason for knowing this, was only going to tear him apart, like lightning trying to tear the sky in two.

 

But there’s beauty in a storm, depending on where you sit, so it seems only fair for there to be some kind of temperamental beauty in his anguish.

 

//////

 

Derek probably fell asleep on the couch sometime in the middle of the storm, because he wakes up the next morning twisted over the couch and with an aching back. There’s a hole in his chest, he thinks, seared so aggressively through his body that it likely goes through the couch too. He figures when he gets up there’ll be a mess of his insides all over the sparkling wooden floor, but this is his childhood house, so the walls are more than used to seeing his heart and soul trampled all over the floor. The sounds of New York City bustling around outside creates an interesting dichotomy with the sharp silence in his brain, and Derek entertains the idea of this being the soundtrack to his life. He thinks that perhaps his pain receptors have taken the day off and been replaced by rookies; it’s like his body can’t decide if he’s numb or in screaming pain. He takes a second to think of the artsy-ass poems in #aesthetic Instagram posts that people think are his idea of what it’s like to be depressed, and tries to weigh them up to the nauseating ways to describe what he feels right now.

 

Needless to say, he doesn’t get up.

 

Derek doesn’t do much for the rest of the day, and the minutes trickle by so slowly that by the time darkness falls he thinks it might have only been a blink since he woke up, his brain demolished by the passage of time and the weight of his agony.

 

Love, he thinks, doesn’t have shit on this. Because now, he thinks of Dex, of loving Dex, of Dex loving him, of having his heart ripped out over and over by lover after lover after Dex, and his brain tells him that’s what he’s feeling now. He doesn’t know if that’s true or not, but they both fucking hurt, and they both involve a gaping hole in his chest, and if your heart isn’t in your chest anymore, and you’re no longer breathing, who gives a shit how it happened? How do you compare those to each other when neither of them involve human fucking feelings that Derek can evaluate?

 

It’s easier, he’s found, to tell people you’re a romantic poetry major that falls hard and fast and documents it all in the flow of words on a scratched up piece of paper, than to tell people you’re never surprised to wake up and find your intestines all over the floor. People always ask him about his take on love, waiting till he’s drunk or high or generally fucked up to hear some artsy and philosophical bullshit, but no one wants to hear the truth.

 

 _Love is like falling down a dark, black hole for so long you just want to get to the bottom no matter what waits there, before landing on something so sharp it spears through your entire chest, and then choosing to do it again because it’s the only kind of death that makes you feel alive._ Yeah. A great response to a pissed and high Samwellian asking for some bullshit like ‘ _falling in love is like handing someone the key to your heart’._

 

Derek drifts off again, and this time he sleeps fitfully through the night. When he dreams, he sees a floor covered in blood, too much blood, his blood, and when he looks up from the floor he sees Dex standing over him, knife in his hand, blood dripping off the knife into the pool on the floor.

 

//////

 

Derek wakes up with a hangover on a Tuesday, and finds that he has no memory of the day before. He doesn’t remember leaving the house since the last Friday, and he assumes he wouldn’t have gone out drunk. He imagines there’s probably smashed bottles and broken chairs somewhere upstairs, but he doesn’t go looking for the mess he caused. Instead, he gets up off the couch, and grabs a bottle of water from the fridge, sculling the whole thing. He doesn’t think he’s eaten anything for a few days, so he rummages through the cupboards and, when he fails to find the energy to make anything actually good for him, makes some ramen.

 

He’s just about to start eating it when he hears the doorbell ring, and he resists the urge to brain himself on the marble bench. He gets up, dejectedly leaving his ramen on the living room table near the front door, and curses whoever who just rang the doorbell, before unlocking it and pulling the door open.

 

Standing on his doorstep is none other than William Poindexter, whose hair is standing on its ends as if he’s been tugging at it for hours, and is staring down at the doormat as though it has personally killed every person he’s ever loved. Derek waits for Dex to pull a knife out and cut Derek’s heart out of his chest or something, because clearly his dropkick brain made him think he was awake when he’s actually still dreaming. Dex looks up, though, and there’s so much anguish in his face that Derek thinks wildly that this might actually be real. As soon as Dex registers Derek standing in front of him, he rushes forward and wraps his arms around Derek in the most aggressive hug Derek has ever received, and now Derek has absolutely no idea what to think.

 

“Jesus fucking Christ, Nursey, _Jesus!_ You complete piece of shit, are you okay?”

 

Dex starts almost patting Derek down, as if he’s checking him for injury, and Derek realises this is in fact not a dream, and William Poindexter is somehow in New York, and is acting as though he wasn’t sure Derek would be alive when he got here.

 

And they say getting blackout drunk on a weekday isn’t fun.

 

Too much time must have passed without Derek saying anything, because Dex pulls back, and his eyes start searching Derek’s face. Derek should probably say something, but when he opens his mouth to say something, his voice is croaky with misuse. He clears his throat and goes for a chirp, because no one ever said Derek Nurse’s defence mechanisms were _good._

“Thought you hated New York, Dexy! Thought you said I’d have to drag you bodily anywhere unrelated to hockey in this city! So, to what do I owe this pleasure?”

 

Dex looks ultimately unimpressed; Derek is unsurprised. He wasn’t really expecting that to work, but he doesn’t know what else to say.

 

“Don’t you fucking start with me, you motherfucker. I’ve been freaking the fuck out since you called me, and then you wouldn’t pick up your damn phone, so I had to drive seven god damn hours to get here just to know whether or not you’re alive, so what you’re not gonna do is act like nothing happened, Nurse.”

 

Derek still has no idea what the fuck is going on. For want of a better comeback, he tells Dex this. 

 

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on. Why the fuck did you drive all the way down here from _Maine_ just to yell at me about not answering the phone?”

 

Derek’s body chooses this moment to give him a dizzy spell, and he remembers how long it’s been since he’s eaten as he (gracefully, shut up Dex) stumbles to the floor and sits down next to the shoe rack. He points at the ramen on the table, and gives Dex a pleading look, hoping he’ll do Derek this solid despite his anger. Dex continues to look unimpressed, so Derek explains.

 

“I don’t think I’ve eaten since like… Saturday? And your rude ass interrupted me before I could eat my ramen. So maybe you could pass me my noodles before I pass out? Or not, you kinda seem like you wouldn’t mind me passing out at this point, which is pretty valid.”

 

The colour drains out of Dex’s face, and in any other circumstances Derek would laugh about Dex being even paler than usual.

 

“You haven’t eaten since – _Derek,_ Jesus Christ. Here, come sit at the table, eat your fucking noodles, I’m finding you some actually edible food as well, and then we’re gonna talk about every damn thing you’ve done this summer to fuck yourself up.”

 

Dex hauls Derek over to the living room table, depositing him in a chair. Derek starts eating, and when Dex asks, he directs Dex to the kitchen. A few minutes later, Dex comes back with a plate of sliced apple and cheese, and Derek wants to protest on the grounds of him not being a literal child, but he thinks he’s probably done enough already, so he shuts up and eats that too.

 

When he finishes, Dex seems to pull another bottle of water out of thin air, and Derek starts sipping from it when it’s handed to him.

 

Dex blinks at him a few times, looking slightly calmer now that he’s attentively watched Derek put actual food into his body and hence knows that he probably isn’t on the verge of death. When Dex finally speaks, it’s quieter than Derek was expecting.

 

“Were you drunk yesterday?”

 

Derek nods. That much he’s pretty sure of. Dex looks wholly unsurprised

 

“Do you remember anything that happened?” Dex asks.

 

Derek shakes his head. He doesn’t really want to admit this to Dex, because he likes to pretend he’s got most of his shit together, but he gets the feeling Dex is aware of something worse than Derek’s tendency to get blackout drunk, so he doesn’t bother censoring himself. Maybe it’s time for him to have someone actually capable of looking out for him sometimes.

 

Dex sighs. Derek looks down at the table. Dex continues with his interrogation.

 

“Do you know where your phone is?”

 

Derek thinks, then shakes his head again. He woke up on the couch, and he hasn’t seen it anywhere downstairs, but he also hasn’t braved upstairs yet, so he thinks there’s a solid chance his phone is upstairs alongside some broken glass and torn family photos.

 

He doesn’t voice all of this, just says “It might be upstairs somewhere, I haven’t looked yet.”

 

Dex runs his hands down his face, and says “I tried calling you a bunch of times overnight, and it went straight to voicemail every time. I thought maybe you’d turned it off or something.”

 

Derek sees a flash of memory of him throwing his phone against a wall, of watching pieces of shattered glass fly across the room, of seeing the destroyed insides of his phone and thinking it looked a little like a self-portrait. He takes a deep breath, then looks at Dex.

 

“There’s a chance I may have smashed my phone yesterday. I don’t actually know if I did or I just wanted to, but – there’s a chance.”

 

Dex mutters something under his breath, and all Derek catches is “fuck, Nurse,” but he doesn’t need to hear it to know how fucked up Dex thinks (knows) he is. He becomes aware, suddenly, of how far out of his way Dex had to go just to look out for Derek like this, and he feels guilt gnawing at his stomach where hunger should have been for the last few days.

 

“Dex, I’m – I’m sorry, that you came all the way down here just to find me – y’know. Same as always, nothing special. I’m sorry you wasted all your time and energy. I don’t – whatever I did to scare you like this, I’m sorry about it.”

 

He doesn’t quite want to say ‘sorry there’s nothing wrong with me,’ because he knows Dex will tear him a new one, and also there are many things wrong with him, he just hopes Dex doesn’t know it.

 

Dex looks up, making eye contact with Derek, and he looks so, so angry, fury etched all over his face. Derek winces, but then watches as, for the first time literally ever, he sees Dex tuck all his anger away, and lets it be replaced by the kind of devastation that breaks Derek’s heart just to look at.

 

“Nursey,” he says, and it sounds more like a plea than anything else, “Nursey, don’t be sorry. I don’t – what on earth do you mean, ‘same as always’? Do you always feel like this?”

  
  
Derek’s not sure what ‘this’ is referring to, because he’s sure that his walls went up fast enough when Dex got here that Dex didn’t see the hole in his chest that Derek’s been toying with for the last few weeks. Plus, despite whatever his depression brain had told him about love, now that Dex is here, some of the screaming voices and violent bouts of pain have quietened, giving him space to breathe. Maybe, he thinks, Dex is truly shocked by Derek not eating; maybe he thinks it was some kind of – deliberate, hurtful thing, which it isn’t, not really.

 

“I’m fine, Dex,” Derek starts, not really sure what to say, “I’m sorry I didn’t, like, stick strictly to the meal plan or whatever, but you know as well as I do that I never let my eating get like this during the season. I just – sometimes I forget to eat, y’know, I don’t get hungry or whatever, that’s the only reason I haven’t eaten in so long. I can – I can try to be better about it, if it makes you feel better about how far you drove to come check up on me.”

 

But Dex just looks disappointed, and still so, so devastated, and what on earth did Derek _do_ to make him look like that?

 

“That’s not what I meant, Nurse. Or, well, thank you for telling me that, and if it helps you at all I can be annoying about meal times during the summer as well so you don’t forget to eat, but. That’s not what’s hurting you most, is it?”

 

He sounds kind of unsure, at the end, his voice lilting up like a question rather than an answer, and Jesus Christ, does he expect Derek to talk about the – the _thing_ inside of him? Derek barely suppresses the urge to lash out at Dex, because as _chill_ as he likes to present, the baseline of his defence mechanisms tends to lean towards getting angry at anyone that gets close to cracking him. Instead, he shuts his face down, and deadpans “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

 

Dex sighs, runs his hand down his face again. When he looks up, he’s laser focused on Derek, and Derek thinks _I might not escape this one so easily._

“Nursey. Derek. I – last night, you called me.”

 

Ahh. So that explains the phone thing, and probably why Dex is here. Fucking hell, what kind of shit did drunk-off-his-face Derek say to Dex? Dex, someone Derek trusts more than almost anyone else, someone Derek has been considering electing as his emergency contact who knows all his medical history, someone Derek is _in love with._ Dex keeps talking.

 

“It was late, and it woke me up, so I didn’t really register the first few things you said to me, but you – Nurse, you said – a lot of things. A lot of alarming things.”

 

Derek feels sick. He considers telling his body to throw his breakfast back up, which probably wouldn’t be that hard, just to get out of this conversation a little longer.

 

“You said – a few things about bleeding out, and fucking hell Nursey, I really thought you’d done – something really fucking bad.”

 

Blood rushes to Nursey’s head, and he feels dizzy. _Jesus._ Dex thought that Derek had – that he’d – Jesus Christ. He can’t even imagine what he’d made Dex go through, but he’s so fucking sorry, and he tries to let his face show it, because he doesn’t think words are going to come out of his mouth right now, no matter how hard he tries.

 

“But you – you kept talking, and you didn’t sound like you were in physical danger, so I listened and I thought – I think you were trying to tell me what it felt like, how it felt like you were bleeding out because of – what was happening in your brain.”

 

Dex grimaces here, and he looks a bit frustrated with not knowing how to describe this. Derek understands, because he knows that Dex doesn’t have much experience talking about mental health, has been trying hard recently to know what the right thing to say is in this kind of situation. He thinks, maybe, that the kind of conversations he’s been having with Derek and Shitty and others on the team haven’t managed to prepare him for something this intense. How do you tell your friend you thought they meant it literally when they said their heart had been ripped from their chest?

 

“You told me that – I don’t even know, Derek, but you talked about it like it was me that – like I was the one that – like I’d taken a knife to your fucking chest, or something.”

 

Dex’s hands are shaking. Derek’s are too. He can’t believe he fucking _told_ Will all this fucked up shit, and he – Jesus, he made Dex think some of this was _his fault._ Fuck.

 

“I just – Nurse, I was really fucking worried about you. Still am. You don’t – you shouldn’t feel like that, _ever_ , and I know that me saying that doesn’t – magically fix it, or whatever, but I don’t understand what happened, don’t know how to recognise which things mean that you’re doing fine and which things mean you’re in enough danger for me to need to drive down here, and I kept thinking – I was trying to decide whether or not to call the cops over to your place, and I just thought – is all of this my fault? Is any of it my fault? Because if I did something, Derek, to you, that made you feel like _this –_ I didn’t mean it. And if you could tell me what I can do to help, I’ll do it, do anything – I can, can, move in with you, if you want, for the rest of the summer, and help you out, or you can come stay in Maine, or if you don’t want to see me I can call someone else from the team and ask them to come stay with you, and we can change the living arrangements for next year, I don’t give a shit about dibs, but just – tell me what I can do to fix it, please. I’m so worried about you.”

 

Derek doesn’t know what to say. A tear rolls down his cheek; he takes a sip from the water bottle. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Dex be this genuine, and he doesn’t know how to be the person Dex deserves him to be right now. He doesn’t think he ever knows how to be what Dex deserves. He can’t sort out the thoughts in his head, so he panics and tells Dex this, because it’s not like they’ve gone far enough with the brutal honesty yet, right?

 

“Will. You know that – that I really fucking don’t deserve you, don’t deserve you caring about me, right? Like, you just fucking drove, what, eight hours, for absolutely nothing, so I’m already wasting your time, and then you’re gonna act like  _you’re_ the one who’s done something wrong?”

 

“Because you told me I’d _cut your heart out of your chest_ , Derek, Jesus fucking Christ, I must’ve done something –”

 

“Because I’m _fucked up,_ William! Because there are so many fucking things messed up in this piece of shit brain in my head, and as if that wasn’t enough, I went and fucking fell in love with someone I could never, ever deserve, and then fucking called that person up and acted like it was their fault I’d fucked myself over!”

 

Derek’s panting for breath, now, but not in the way where he might be about to have a panic attack, just in the way where he’s finally said something out loud that he’s been carrying around on his shoulders for almost a year, and he doesn’t know how to move forward from that.

 

Dex is completely silent. Derek puts his head in his hands. He can’t believe he actually just fucking _said_ that.  

 

Derek hears Dex’s chair scrape away from the table, and he knows he’s finally done it, he’s finally driven the person he loves most away once and for all.

 

But then Dex is sitting down in the chair right next to Derek, and wrapping his arms around Derek’s torso, and Derek’s fully sobbing right now, but Dex just holds him, and starts whispering “Derek, _sweetheart,_ it’s okay, you’re not fucked up, it’s okay.”

 

“I am, Will, I’m so fucked up, I’m sorry, Will, I’m sorry,” Derek’s saying, and he doesn’t even know what’s coming out of his mouth right now, all he knows is that Dex should have left by now, and he hasn’t, so he mustn’t have understood what Derek said, because if he did, why would he be here? Derek lets himself keep crying, because now that he’s started he’s not really sure how to stop.

 

He cries for his parents, who had let him know when he was so young that they’d never care about him, and let him grow into someone that doesn’t expect care from anyone. He cries for the kids that pushed him into lockers every damn day in high school after he came out, cries for the fake friends he’d had all through his time at Andover and his expectation of fakeness when he’d joined the team at Samwell. He cries, more than anything else, for Dex, who keeps holding him while he cries, like he can see everything wrong with Derek and all the ways he’s been hurt and still chooses to be there, beside him. He cries for how much he loves Dex, how much he wants Dex to be happy and how much Derek wants to be happy too, even if he doesn’t normally admit it to himself. He cries for the person most people think he is, and for the person that he is, and then eventually, somewhere between heartbreak and acceptance, he stops crying.

 

When he thinks he’s all cried out, he sniffles, and Dex leans for the box of tissues in the middle of the table, passing it to him. Derek looks up at Dex, and he thinks he should be embarrassed, but Dex looks so genuinely kind and caring, so he really can’t find it in him to care.

 

When Derek calms down completely, he takes a sip from the bottle of water, and looks at Dex, in what he hopes is an apologetic way. Dex, who still has one of his arms around Derek’s waist, pulls Derek into his side, effectively cuddling him, and then presses a kiss to the top of Derek’s hair. If Derek’s brain weren’t literally short-circuiting right now, he’d probably be offended at how patronising it should feel.

 

Dex clears his throat, then asks, in a quiet and calm voice, “Is it okay if I talk now?”

 

Derek nods. Dex starts speaking, but never stops holding Derek, his hand occasionally stroking up and down Derek’s side.

 

“First of all, I hope I’m not being… presumptuous, by assuming that you were talking about me. I don’t – I can’t say I understand, Derek, but I’m not going to question it, not when I’ve basically been in love with you since halfway through freshman year. And I – I know it’s not the part that really matters right now, but I want you to know that I – I’d like to do this properly, you and me, if you’d like to as well.”

 

He pauses here, as if he’s waiting for Derek to respond, so in lieu of actually saying anything, Derek snuggles further into Dex’s arms and gives an aggressive kind of nod. He still doesn’t think he deserves it, so they probably have a long way to go, but the last thing he wants is Dex getting the impression that Derek isn’t down for this. Dex holds Derek a little bit tighter, then keeps talking.

 

“I – I still don’t know if there is something that I did wrong, and if there is I really hope it’s something you’ll talk to me about so I can help fix it. And if I didn’t – the point stands, Nursey, that there’s nothing wrong with you. I know – I know that I don’t understand everything, and I’m sure there are plenty of things that you’ve never told me, that you never have to tell me, but sweetheart, the things that people have done to hurt you in the past, and the way those things have affected you – they’re not your fault. They’re not things that are wrong with you, and you shouldn’t ever feel like you’re worth less because of them. And – we both know I never know how to talk about this, but Derek, it’s not your fucking fault if you have a mental illness. I know you know that. So anything that you feel as a result of your mental illnesses, direct or otherwise, doesn’t make you fucked up. You hear me? You’re not fucked up, you’re fucking brilliant, and you deserve _everything._ You deserve the entire world, Derek. And you deserve to be able to ask for help, so even if that’s not what you were asking for when you called me, it’s what I’m here for, and you can’t tell me for a second that you don’t deserve to have that. Okay?”

 

Derek really thought that he’d cried himself out, a few minutes ago, but another tear rolls down his cheek before he can stop it. This time, he’s the one that pulls in closer to Dex, and he honestly just can’t believe that he gets to have this, can’t believe that Dex is right here, and that he’s here just because he cares. Dex _cares_ about him, is what he’s telling Derek, and it doesn’t – Derek’s _never_ had someone that cared, has never felt like he deserved someone who did, and now Dex isn’t just saying he cares about him, but he’s saying that he _deserves that_ , and Jesus fucking Christ, what on earth is Derek supposed to do here? There’s nothing wrong with him, Dex is saying, he’s not fucked up, he’s just had bad things happen to him. And it’s not – listen, Derek doesn’t suddenly just _believe_ Dex, but he does kind of – consider, that maybe, Dex isn’t wrong.

 

And he – Dex _loves_ him. Which, you know, sounds like a fucking disaster waiting to happen to Derek, but what does he know? What does his romantic fucking ass know about the kind of love that people use to do something good? Because Dex is here, and he’s done the whole dramatic-Hallmark-movie thing of driving down and knocking on Derek’s door then flinging himself onto Derek when the door opens and not letting go, but he’s also – genuinely helping. Derek feels like all the pieces of his insides that have gathered on the hardwood floor over the summer are suddenly crawling back towards him, seamlessly arranging themselves inside him in a perfect imitation of the insides of a normal, living, human being. And that’s just – that’s just Dex’s influence, y’know? That’s just what happens when this perfect human that Derek loves, and that apparently loves Derek back, sits here and holds him and tells him that he’s going to be okay with such conviction that it becomes an irrefutable truth.

 

So Derek sits back, grabs Dex’s hand, and puts it inside his hand, resting them both over his own heart, as if to say to both of them _look, there’s no hole there, my heart is inside my body and it won’t stop beating._ He looks at Dex, who’s looking right back at him like he never wants to look at anything else, and says “thank you. Thank you so much. You’ve never done anything wrong, you’ve never hurt me, and the thing living inside my brain pretending to be part of me told me you did, but you told it to fuck off, and it listened. And now I’m more okay than I’ve been all summer, just from being by your side, because you told me you care and somehow I believe you, so. Thank you.”

 

Dex brings Derek’s hand up to his face, and kisses Derek’s knuckles a few times.

 

“I love you,” he says.

 

Derek says it right back. He hopes he never has to stop saying it right back.

 

**Author's Note:**

> (In depth trigger warning:  
> Derek’s internal monologue describes the depression symptoms he experiences as a physical and gory injury on several occasions. Derek discusses his experience with depression, as well as other emotional trauma he's experienced, and also gets very drunk off-screen; we see the repercussions of this. Derek also doesn't eat for several days, though it's not presented as an intentional method of self-harm. Finally, Will briefly mentions that he interpreted something Derek said as an indication of suicidal tendencies on Derek's part, though Will seems to realize that isn't the case. This is referenced a few times.)
> 
> Yes, this is in fact an AU where William Poindexter is self aware enough to register Derek’s love confession, because let’s be real, actual Dex would literally never realise that Derek was talking about him. He’d be all like ‘oh, did you call someone else? Do you want me to call them now and get them to talk to you?’ 
> 
> Not pictured:  
> \- Because they got the ‘I love you’s out of the way so early, Dex and Nursey just skip like the first year of a relationship, so when they move into the Haus together they’re acting like they’ve been dating for 2 years. This confuses the team endlessly, because everyone (except Bitty, probably) genuinely thought they really hated each other, and after a few sly texts from Johnson, most of the team become convinced some serious trickery was involved and they all just like. Forgot that Dex and Nursey had been dating.  
> \- Will spends the seven-hour drive flipping between being super pissed at Nursey and being incredibly worried, intermittently broken up by fielding calls from his family about he and the car being missing at 3am on a Tuesday. Chowder calls him at one point, because someone in Will’s family managed to bring the big guns in and call C, and Will tells him everything, then promptly breaks down crying and has to pull the car over. This doesn’t last long, because he needs to get to Nursey now, C!  
> \- Will has literally spent every minute since he met Nursey physically holding back from using pet names all. the. time. So literally the minute he figures out Nursey likes him back, he just throws them all out there, as pictured above.
> 
> Also not pictured: Me, having a break down at like 2am, because for some reason I alternate so rapidly between first names and nick names for both of them that I probably put a whole bunch of 'Will's where there should be 'Dex's and so on. Sorry! It's a recurring problem! I hate myself!
> 
> This somehow manages to be the first thing in the Check, Please! universe that I'm posting, so please tell me what you thought! 
> 
> To celebrate asexual awareness week with me, hear me yell about real life hockey shit along with omgcp shit, or just generally watch me be a human disaster, come hang out with me on [tumblr](https://anybodyhavealaurens.tumblr.com) !


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